10.4 Widget Site Opens Doors

sammykrupa writes "My new venture has just opened its doors. Dashboard Lineup is a site where developers can talk about the OS X Tiger widgets they are developing and and tips and tricks can be exchanged. There are also discussions about ideas for widgets. It's also worth mentioning that if you are a developer you can use the free hosting for widgets I have set up."

Comments

What about the other Dashboard sites?

[vocaro]

This "news item" sounds a bit like a thinly veiled advertisement for the submitter's site. Why no mention of the other Dashboard sites that have sprung up recently, like Dashboard Exchange and DashboardWidgets?

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[mipod]

Yeah, honestly... there have been a bunch of Dashboard sites around for a while, The Dashboard was created a few days after DB was announced. Being innovative would be far more worthy of a slashdot post, rather than coming out with a crappy looking site 9 months late.

If you want to see a nice one, though, look at DashboardWidgets. Lotsa widgets up already...

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[greed]

It wasn't thinly veiled: "My new venture has just opened its doors."

Doesn't get much more blatant than that.

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[andreMA]

Floating clocks and weather forcasts? WTF?

Is Dashboard/Kornfabulator really anything more than a pretty toy?

For you, at this point, perhaps not. Stock quotes and realtime airline flight tracking are also commonly mentioned as Dashboard uses, as are currency converters, calculators, webcam monitors, whatnot. I suspect that many people will find one or more of these quite useful; if you don't then that's fine: don't use them.

Personally like the notion of having a hide-able layer; others may prefer a 3rd party solution to do virtual desktops in OS X to contain these minor items - something that I personally don't care for. Dashboard is just another option; take it or leave it.

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[KillerDeathRobot]

The time: Look at the upper-right of the screen, where there is already a time display.

Lots of people prefer an analog display to a digital one for telling time. I'll agree that a clock isn't super-necessary, but if you don't want it, you can easily turn it off.

What it's like outside: Look out a window. You know, that big glass pane on one wall of your boss's office?

Oh yes, because looking out a window will tell you the temperature and the chance of precipitation later. On top of that, everyone obviously has a huge window right near their computer.

Anything else to say?

Yes: It's hard to believe that you can't see the benefits of the various widgets on the dashboard. Maybe you personally don't have a whole lot of use for two particular ones, but there are tons more and furthermore they're easy to develop (HTML and CSS) and thus there will likely be lots of novel ones. Take second to look outside (no pun intended) your narrow little world and see that everyone is not you.

Re:This one has been around for years...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I tried Konfabulator, as did a number of people I know. For me I stopped using it because it was a hog, and just slowed down my machine too much. The lack of compelling/really useful widgets was a problem. A friend of mine summed it up with, "When the demo expired and I had to consider paying for it, I had already stopped using it, so I just deleted it." That was basically it for a lot of us. It just was not very useful. Dashboard looks to be more so. And it is free, so even if I only book a flight once a year, or look up a phone number in the yellow pages once a week, there is no reason not to have it.

Re:From TFA

[Elwood P Dowd]

Uh, yeah. I'm a jackass.

You win, though: first of five to point it out.

Re:Can someone please explain...

[ferratus]

It's really nice. I've been using multiple developer preview releases over the last few months (legally) and Dashboard certainly sticks out as being a very useful feature.

Press F12, they all appear, use them and hit F12 again and they're gone. Instantly. Stuff like:

- the iTunes controller.

- calculator (no more opening this app for just a quick calculation)

- the calendar view (simply seing the entire month is handy, since otherwise you had to go to the terminal, iCal or editing the time to see it, your iCal stuff also appear)

- Converter. Converting money from CAD to USD (in my case) is really convinient and faster than hitting a web site)

Overall, very nice feature. It's one of those things that makes it really hard to go back to panther after using Tiger for a little while.

Automator?

[swein515]

And why no thinly veiled advertisement for Automator Sites? :)

List of Existing Dashboard Widget Sites

[lux55]

• DashboardExposed (I'm the admin of this site)
• DashboardWidgets
• Widget Developer
• Dashboard Exchange